By Sarah Corcoran, Interim Deputy Director for the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Sierra Club
As we approach the holidays and create memories with our families, we also create something else – lots of trash. The average U.S. resident creates almost five pounds of trash a day; we lead nationally in waste created, plastics used and recyclable materials not recycled. Microplastics have been found literally everywhere – arctic glaciers, the crops we grow, even our own bloodstreams, and there’s an island of plastics in the Pacific that is twice the size of Texas. Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, residents have been fighting a landfill expansion that wouldn’t even be a consideration if we could reduce the amount of waste we create annually.
The term “zero-waste” is here to stay. You see companies creating plastic-free options, supermarkets banning plastic bags, restaurants handing out paper straws instead of plastic ones and influencers sharing videos of their favorite plastic-free swaps. Is this making a difference though? Most people can’t go completely zero-waste -- it can be expensive and many products that we need are packaged in materials that can’t be recycled -- but even small changes can add up.
Let’s look at things numerically. Say you create 4.5 pounds of trash a day (slightly below the national average), that’s 31.5 pounds a week. A 13 gallon trash bag holds about 20 pounds, so you’re creating a bag and a half of trash a week, or roughly six bags a month. Multiply that by 365 days and that’s over 1,600 pounds, or just over 82 trash bags. If you can reduce the amount of trash you throw out each day by just one pound, you would reduce the number of trash bags that you add to the landfill by 18 per year. That may not seem like much, but according to the 2020 Census, there are over 210,000 people living in Lackawanna County alone. If everyone in Lackawanna reduced the amount they throw away by a pound a day that would be 3,780,000 less trash bags a year… that really adds up!
So, how can we reduce our waste? According to the EPA, food and lawn waste make up over a third of our garbage each year, an additional 23% is cardboard and paper products. Cardboard and paper are ridiculously easy to recycle and most food waste can be composted – right there you have over a 50 percent reduction in waste! The other half is filled with things that could be recycled (like glass and metal), things that could be reused (like clothing), things that could be refurbished (like electronics) or things that could be reduced or replaced (like single use items). These numbers relate to municipal waste, trash that comes out of households – not factories, construction sites or retail establishments – and it may seem like a small lift, but small steps move us forward, and we can no longer stand still.
This blog was included as part of the November 2022 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!